In The Boy Who Invented Skiing, A Memoir, Wolfe  captures a West that no longer exists--from growing up on ranches in the high country of Colorado and Montana to working underground as a miner for Anaconda Copper in Butte.

Swain Wolfe spent his childhood in magical places, exploring the mesas and tunnels of his father's tuberculosis sanatorium near the Garden of the Gods and later his step-father's ranch on a horse named Joe. Nature was his mirror, allowing him to escape his parents failing marriage, his father's despair, and his mother's brutal second marriage.

As a young boy, Swain risked life and limb by strapping his galoshes to homemade, cross-country skis he found in the hayloft. Aided by milk barn brooms for poles, he invented a primitive form of downhill racing.

Family violence forced a move away from the mountains and wild rivers of Colorado to Missoula, Montana. Having defined himself in the natural word, he found the people in town as alien as they found him. He spent his life attempting to understand his intelligent, dangerously complex mother--a woman far ahead of her time.

He discovered he could immerse himself in work as he had in nature. He learned to work with draft horses and saw the end of the era of horse-drawn farm equipment. He worked in lumber mills, led a crew into one of Montana's worst forest fires, and cut timber until the trees started talking to him. But it was mining thousands of feet below the earth's surface that changed his life.

Swain absorbed the skills of natural story tellers--ranchers, loggers, and miners--and tells the stories of the free thinkers, hardscrabble philosophers, desperate characters, spirited women, and outsider artists who embodied the boom spirit of the West after World War II. 

Excerpts from THE BOY WHO INVENTED SKIING, A MEMOIR:

Vanity:

I had buckteeth. Grown-ups considered it cute, but my schoolmates and the hired men set me straight. I was a freak. (My parents) drove me all the way to Denver, where I was sorely braced with screws, wire, and nasty little hooks-punishment for imperfection. We subject ourselves to endless pain and sleepless nights so we can bulge out in some places and not others. Deciding where the bulges go and don't is everyone else's job but ours, and they can never make up their minds.

Women:

"We were like bunnies-you know how bunnies do it?"

"Fast I guess."

She gave me a wicked look. "Right. Then the boy bunny rolls off and lays there like he's dead, but the girl bunny jumps into her peddle pushers and hops into the woods, leaving the boy bunny to the predators."

It was disconcerting to look up and see the magnified eye of a woman observing me under her Darwin scope. I discovered I was threatened by women who were fascinated by evolutionary survival tactics. They were thinking like men.

Drinking:

Alcohol had replaced going to church as the primary social lubricant for a particular group of postwar types. Drinking brought them together. They drank to make love, deals, and money. They drank to loosen up, hitch up, and break up. Most of all, drinking defined the arc of friendship and love. Drinking was just too damned good to be true.

Working:

After high school, which I never finished, life became a series of jobs. I didn't last long at any one of them, but I rarely quit or got fired for the same reason twice-the money ran out, the contract ended, the season ended, the foreman couldn't stand me, I couldn't stand him, I went a little nuts and jumped ship, and there were others, including the fact that I could be a real son of a bitch. Being lazy never got me fired that I remember.

Fishing:

At that perfect moment, I realized fishing was merely my way of searching for that hidden thing-the secret under the surface, the mystery of the universe, the truth. It was an unconscious craving, but always there, deep in my brain, nosing around like a trout searching for a winged morsel. Fishing wasn't going to reveal anything but fish. At the instant fishing became a metaphor, I flicked the fly off the water, reeled in the line, and went home. That was the end of fishing.

Mining:

There is a thing that happens underground that can happen nowhere else--an arrangement of motion, light, and the passage of your mind and body through the earth. If you stand looking forward, on the back of the last car of a long train whose motor car is around the bend, you will be moving through a tunnel supported by stull timbers, illuminated only by the lamp on your hard hat. It feels as though reality is being projected from the middle of your head and you are always moving into a world you can never quite enter, because you are always in the dark.

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